Travel to North Berwick

“Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.” Michael Ondaatje

Welcome to The Flâneurs Project. This post is part of our Longing for Places series. By subscribing, you’re supporting my writing and becoming part of our small community.

Arrival

In the summer of 2019, I booked a flight from Berlin to Edinburgh with the desire to spend a few nights in North Berwick, a small Scottish town by the North Sea.

This spontaneous trip was a reaction to the death of my grandmother, a death that brought me so much grief that I couldn’t contain it anymore, so I decided to pour it into a place.

These reactions have a name, apparently, they are called “griefcations”. I went to North Berwick to write about time (travel) and to grieve well.

Back then I was obsessed with an idea that I had for a time travel novella, the thoughts of which didn’t leave me for many years. A novella entitled Travel to Edinburgh, set in Edinburgh, of course, exploring time, grief, and the love triangle of three main characters: Ava, Alexander, and Aindrea.

I arrived in North Berwick in the middle of August 2019 and spent a few nights at an Airbnb which I thought would be in a central location close to cafés and bars but it wasn’t. I was hosted by a lovely woman in her sixties who was also called Patricia. She picked me up from the train station with the car and brought me to her place two kilometres away from the city centre. As soon as I arrived at my temporary home, I changed clothes, packed my camera, and swiftly left to explore the town.

One big thing that has drawn me to North Berwick was Bass Rock, an island two kilometres away from the shore. If I wanted to keep on writing my time travel novella, I knew that I had to see this place. The history of the island is pretty fascinating: from being a prison in the 15th century to having an entire chapter dedicated to this place in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “Catriona”.

Photo by Andrew Embleton

“It was an unco place by night, unco by day; and there were unco sounds; of the calling of the solans [gannets], and the plash [splash] of the sea, and the rock echoes that hung continually in our ears. It was chiefly so in moderate weather. When the waves were anyway great they roared about the rock like thunder and the drums of armies, dreadful, but merry to hear, and it was in the calm days when a man could daunt himself with listening; so many still, hollow noises haunted and reverberated in the porches of the rock.”¹

Places

• The Ship Inn

After my arrival, I searched for the best fish and chips in town and The Ship Inn captured my eye. The place was cosy and full of life. One thing that I vividly remember is that there were more dogs than people at the inn. The fish was delicious. I ordered a glass of Chardonnay, and I took some notes of the atmosphere inside the inn.

I couldn’t fully enjoy my time there because I was worried about not remembering the route back to Patricia’s house. As it was getting darker and darker outside, my phone died on me. So, I quickly paid at the bar and found my way back to my host’s home eventually. I remember feeling quite uneasy walking along the main road at night.

• The Scottish Seabird Centre

The Bass Rock is home to 150,000 gannets. From afar the little island seems covered in snow. If you took a look closer you could see the birds nesting all over the place.

Photo by Kristin Snippe

I hoped to get some inspiration from the bird centre. However, even though the centre was fascinating, I felt a sense of void being there. I went outside and sat on a bench. I remember how beautiful the view of the sea was and for a moment I felt some sense of peace. The benches were named after locals who passed away.

• The Town

I walked the streets of North Berwick, searching for omens and inspiration for my writing. One memory I dearly hold onto is of a man reading a book on a bench by the sea. I felt the impulse to approach him and ask about his book, but I didn’t.

Writing

I didn’t write as much as I wanted on this trip. I absorbed the place and kept carrying along a feeling of displacement. I also terribly missed my grandmother and I named a character in my novella after her: Maria.

Writing sci-fi and writing fantasy are two different things. I wanted to know and to understand more about time and time-travel. So, in preparation for this trip, I printed papers and articles, and bought two books on time travel that I wanted to read closely.

Photo by Paul Levesley

Leaving and Leaving Again

I left North Berwick feeling quite out of place. I returned to Berlin, my then-home, knowing that those would be the last months in Berlin before packing everything and hopefully heading to Switzerland. In January 2020 I was moved to a little village in the Swiss mountains. A few months later the pandemic hit. I stopped writing on my novella and worked on a short story which was quite similar as it involved time-travel but which slowly crossed into fantasy.

My time in North Berwick could be seen from the outside as a griefcation, as time away in a foreign place to make sense of the loss of someone I loved. But at the same time, as I remember Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”, I am aware that it was a journey to find some comforting omens and solace in the promise of time travel, even if just in my imagination.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_Rock